Now the workstation is built, it’s named (Kronos), and it’s physically installed into the observatory. It’s time to install the software.
I’ve tried lots of different types of software over the years, and with the various drivers for Ascom etc, it can get kinda messy. Installing a system from scratch is an opportunity for a clean build.
So what software? – here’s what I use.
Ascom – an absolute must. The ascom drivers allow for open plug and play control standards. https://ascom-standards.org/index.htm
Starry Night Pro Plus 8 – Planetarium software. The software allows for Telescope control, gives me a view of the night sky, and you can enter your equipment so that your astronomy cameras display the correct FOV (field of view) for framing your shots, and you can slave your telescope to the view. It requires a decent graphics card as it uses OpenGL – it runs quite nicely on my Nvidia GTX1080 I must admit.
Sequence Generator Pro
This software ties all the equipment together and allows me to control the cameras and create sequences for capturing the LRGB images for specific durations. It also does the autofocusing and the autoguiding (it integrates with PhdGuiding 2.
I used to use MaximDL (does a similar job), I feel that it’s not as advanced as SGP Pro – strangely it costs more – It hasn’t been updated in a while, so although I installed it, I won’t go into much detail about it here.
PhD Guiding 2 – the best auto-guiding software around. It’s open-source and free as well. Can’t beat free.
PixInsight – The Image Editor
The best software for stacking, callibrating and processing images that you can get. It’s really good, but quite complicated. It also requires a bit of processing power and RAM, but I’ve catered for that, so it’s all good.
I also have Adobe Photoshop, which is a great image processor – and one of the most famous but it’s not specifically designed to process astrophotography images, so while it’s useful on occasion, I mostly use PixInsight.
Skytools – used for planning what I will image that evening. I use version 3, and the newer v4 is now out, but I haven’t upgraded yet.
Platesolving – PlateSolve 2
This software is for automatically identifying the stars in an image. It’s quite useful, and it’s free. SGP Pro uses it, as does lots of software actually, it’s more of a utility, but it’s good.
N.I.N.A – Nighttime Imaging ‘n Astronomy
Ok, I haven’t actually used this yet, it does similar stuff to SGP, and I’ve read some good things about it. It’s open source and free, so I’ve installed it, and I’ll give it a whurl to see if I like it.
The drivers for the equipment
ZWO 1600MM, ZWO 174MM, ZWO Focus Wheel, Moonlight DRO focuser, Microtouch Focuser, 10 Micron Telescope Driver, and Virtual Keypad 2.